Rep. Maloney tours 2 Orange County Superfund sites

A seven-acre Newburgh waterfront site once contaminated with PCBs, volatile organic compounds and metals is now on the comeback trail and being eyed for redevelopment by city officials.

BY MICHAEL RANDALL

A seven-acre Newburgh waterfront site once contaminated with PCBs, volatile organic compounds and metals is now on the comeback trail and being eyed for redevelopment by city officials.

The former Consolidated Iron & Metal company's old waterfront scrap metal processing site was one of several Superfund success stories that federal Environmental Protection Agency officials took Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-Cold Spring, on a tour Monday to see.

The tour also included another Orange County site — a former chemical wastewater disposal site in Hamptonburgh.

Superfund is a federal cleanup program established by Congress in 1980 which, whenever possible, requires polluters rather than taxpayers to pay for rehabilitating hazardous waste sites.

About $33 million, including $13 million from responsible parties, has been spent cleaning up the Consolidated site since it was added to the Superfund list in 2001.

Today, it is covered in grasses and wildflowers.

Newburgh Mayor Judy Kennedy said the city hopes to do "something for the public" there.

"It has so much potential," Kennedy said.

EPA Regional Administrator Judith Enck said six feet of contaminated soil was removed from the site, which was an active disposal site from the 1950s until 1999.

Maloney said "restoring sites like this" and keeping the Superfund program funded are priorities for him, especially when it benefits a place like the City of Newburgh.

"We can't get the Hudson Valley right until we get Newburgh right," Maloney said.

Cleaning the 29.3-acre Hamptonburgh site so far has cost about $3 million. It was used by the former Harriman-based Nepera to store chemical wastewater in lagoons. It was added to the Superfund list in 1986.

Mark Dannenburg, an EPA remedial project manager, said more than 83,000 tons of contaminated topsoil was removed from the site.

There are no immediate plans for redevelopment of the site, but Pfizer, the parent company of Warner Lambert, which acquired Nepera in 1957, issued a statement saying it hopes to "position the site for future reuse that benefits the region."